Viljami is the Lead Front-End Designer at Adtile. He is also the founder of Helsinki Device Lab which is established to help the web developer community of Helsinki to be able to test their responsive designs on a growing range of mobile devices. He’s passionate about responsive design, CSS, JavaScript and web typography, and both tweets and writes actively about these subject. Viljami has been designing web sites for over a decade.

There are several ways to make navigation responsive, and usually the solution we need is quite straightforward. But despite the apparent simplicity, there are many underlying factors which, when thought through and implemented properly, can make a simple solution even better without adding more complexity to the user interface.

One of the problems I’ve encountered while building responsive navigations is that browsers currently don’t support CSS3 transitions to a height which is defined auto. Most of the time, we shouldn’t use fixed height either because the height of menu items might not be the same in all browsers, and the number of items may change. I also always try to reduce the weight of pages I build, so I’ve been wanting a solution that doesn’t require a big library such as jQuery to work.

Managing a personal device lab can be quite hard with an ever expanding number of devices. It’s not only expensive, but also bad for our environment. Think of a situation where every web developer would purchase a large pile of gadgets and keep adding new ones as they are launched — this wouldn’t make much sense. Thankfully, there are better ways to handle the problem.

During the spring of 2012, Jeremy Keith wrote on his website that anybody is welcome to visit their device lab at Clearleft’s office in Brighton, UK and use their devices. What they didn’t expect, though, was that in response many local developers offered to add their own devices to the collection as well. Two weeks later Jeremy Keith and Remy Sharp also presented this idea at the Mobilism conference in Amsterdam and the people attending loved it. A few months after Mobilism, similar labs started popping up in places like Amsterdam, Berlin, London and Malmö.

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